On the recordJune 16, 2015
on Thursday, Pope Francis will officially release a historic encyclical on the environment. An encyclical is a personal message from the Pope to Catholic bishops and the 1.2 billion Catholics around the world on a topic that he feels requires urgent attention. It is an opportunity for the Pope to bring together accumulated teachings in a comprehensive way. This will be only Pope Francis's second papal missive, and it has garnered enough attention that the conservative Heartland Institute traveled to the Vatican this spring to respectfully inform the Pope that there is no global warming crisis. Earlier this week, my colleague Senator Inhofe agreed with the Heartland Institute and told them that Pope Francis should ``stay with his job and we'll stay with ours.'' Well, I disagree with Senator Inhofe. Pope Francis is doing his job, but it is Republicans in this Chamber who are not doing theirs. To those critics who say that Pope Francis shouldn't be speaking out on this, I will give them a very simple history lesson. Pope Francis is not the first to speak out on climate change and environmental protection. He will join a chorus of previous pontiffs who drew attention to the crisis of climate change and its impact on people, especially the poor and the children of our planet. In 1971, Pope Paul VI warned that human actions that harm nature may make the future intolerable.…
